


i'll give it all back (just to do it again)

by Rupzydaisy



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon Divergent, Fix-It, Gen, Post Film, bar scene au with lykon and quynh, lykon lives and lives and lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:53:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27063706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rupzydaisy/pseuds/Rupzydaisy
Summary: He has spent so many shining moments with his sisters. They have raced from sea to sea and explored old and new horizons together, fought so many dazzling battles, and it had filled him with an indescribable joy to think the three of them could continue to do that forever. His smile widens, even while he tastes the blood in his mouth.Quynh's grip tightens on his arm as she whispers, "You can't.""No, Lykon. Not now. Please." Andromache's hand brushes his cheek.He thinks his heart might break with the love he feels for them.
Relationships: Andy & Lykon & Quynh & Joe & Nicky & Nile & Booker, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Lykon, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Lykon & Quynh | Noriko, Lykon & Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 10
Kudos: 94





	i'll give it all back (just to do it again)

**Author's Note:**

> lykon headcanon week - day six: any headcanon  
> headcanon: that they only die when they accept that they want to go, aka Lykon lives (and he uses that knowledge a millennium later)

He feels the pain endure far longer than normal for a wound that on any other day would have healed itself up. 

"Lykon? Lykon!" Andromache reaches him first, where he's been dragged and sprawled out on the back of the cart, caught wrong in a fall, caught unawares, and he doesn't want her to feel any guilt for this. 

It's been a tickle of a thought at the back of his mind, something that he's never quite banished. 

_Perhaps. One day. Maybe. All things end, do they not?_

They do indeed. And in the sluggish thudding of his heart, it comes back to him, along with a tentative peace. 

"It's time."

Quynh shakes her head and she's filled with a fear that he can feel too. She clenches her hand around his arm and holds on as if she can ground him. 

"Andromache," Lykon whispers, feeling her press against the wound and the flow of blood, trying to staunch it with her bare hands. "Andromache, it's time."

"No." 

There is a disbelief in her eyes that he thinks he's not seen before, and he thinks it could be true. She's older than both of them and weary of her long existence, but maybe she never truly entertained the thought that she could, one day, die. They speak of other things, doubts and fears, but he had a different kind of tiredness gnaw away at his heart for some time. It was one that he had struggled to put into words. 

A wetness falls onto his arm as his breathing turns shallower. When Lykon turns his head, he sees the tears rolling down Quynh's cheeks, and his heart aches deeper than any injury. 

He doesn't want to leave them. 

He has spent so many shining moments with his sisters. They have raced from sea to sea and explored old and new horizons together, fought so many dazzling battles, and it had filled him with an indescribable joy to think the three of them could continue to do that forever. His smile widens, even while he tastes the blood in his mouth. 

Quynh's grip tightens on his arm as she whispers, "You can't."

"No, Lykon. Not now. Please." Andromache's hand brushes his cheek.

He thinks his heart might break with the love he feels for them. 

They are more than family; they are three strands of life tied together and have walked together for centuries. It has been the greatest gift of his life to know them. He doesn’t know how he can leave them. 

His heart does not break; instead it beats stronger, and he groans in pain as the wound across his torso slowly begins to knit itself back together. 

He does not want to leave them. 

The wound begins to shrink under Andromache's tentative fingers. The flesh grows back, inch by inch, burning painfully as though he was being sliced open over and over, until the feeling dulls and he's able to move. The blood flow lessens too, and Quynh tears of sorrow begin to turn to ones of joy. 

It ends up being the longest of all his healings. It had not been as painstakingly slow since he first discovered that death could not claim him, and there is no lack of understated awe when he finally is able to run his hands over his unmarked skin. 

Scrambling into the cart, Quynh falls beside him to pull him close and screams at the sky, her happiness mingling with the sound of birds squawking as they take to the air. Andromache follows, face tucked close to his neck. Her hands grip so tight, they could have left bruises. 

Lykon merely closes his eyes and holds them tight. "It's not my time, not yet."

* * *

The years pass them like leaves on the wind and water in the stream; they cannot turn the tide of time. But they walk on together, and their small family grows as Yusuf, Nicolo, and Booker find them. 

A new millennium eventually dawns and exposes a fault line buried deep in Booker that puts them in a new danger and brings back old fears. But their newest arrival, Nile, with her gritted teeth and her open heart, helps swing things to favour them. After the harrowing events in London, they pile into the car and drive away. 

The space is too small, seven of them wedged into the small vehicle, and there is a tension in the backseat that sits somewhere between a black hole and the eye of a hurricane. 

It will take some dug in feet to keep their family from falling in. 

Quynh picks at the dried blood on her wrists and Lykon reaches around to place his hand on hers to still the movement. It had been one unsettling experience after another since they had been dragged out of the Charlie safehouse, and there would be long nights fending off nightmares to come. But for now, she says nothing from her perch on his lap, only looks over at Andromache, at the wound on her shoulder, and Lykon feels her shaky breaths against his chest. 

He lets his forehead bump up against the back of her neck and thinks, _we've been here before, perhaps it is her time, if she wishes._

Although he's about to say something, it's Nile that beats him to it after her feet kick up against a mini first aid kit tucked under the driver's seat. 

"Andy, I can patch you up if you pull over." 

"No, we need more distance. That scene back there is gonna attract attention." She guns the engine and merges lanes, heading out of the city. 

"Andromache, let her help." Lykon mutters, echoed by a hum from Nicky.

It's a credit to her stubbornness that she holds out for another ten minutes. Then she pulls over on the hard shoulder on a slip road and all except Booker clamber out to stretch their legs. When it's time to move again, Lykon is waiting. He shakes his head and gently turns her back around to sit with Quynh in the front seat before hopping into the driver's side himself. 

Later, around the table in the corner of a pub that they had visited when the floors and walls were freshly laid, the stifling silence returns and their drinks do nothing to loosen their tongues. 

"This," Andromache twists in her seat, twists her lip too, and looks on at all of them with a heavy mixture of guilt and grief. "Nothing like this has ever happened to us before." 

Nile holds her untouched glass in her hands and sighs, "Is it...because of me?" 

"No, it's not you." Booker leans back, his whisky swallowed in two quick mouthfuls. "It was me, wasn't it." 

A harsh chuckle escapes Joe's mouth. 

Nicky's head dips, "It doesn't work like that." 

He speaks from experience and a regret that transformed into good fortune. For the two of them, fate's invisible hand _could_ do favours, perhaps, if the wind blew right and somewhere far down the line there was _good_ waiting to come out from it. 

Booker snorts, "Maybe not for you." 

Beside him, Quynh shoulders tense up. Her hand remains clasped around Andromache's, but he can see the look in her eye, recognising it from an almost-forgotten memory of a day nearly a millennium ago when they came close to losing him, and he, them. 

One he still carried with him as the counterweight to centuries of immortality. 

"No." Lykon speaks, reaching out a hand across the table towards Andromache. "This has happened before."

In her newness, Nile is quick to ask, rather than shying away. "When?" 

Booker only stares, and then slides his chair back, as though he's considering leaving the table, having heard the story before. 

"Do you remember?" Lykon asks gently. 

It's Quynh's free hand that reaches his first, but Andromache's follows, and he gently holds them both, careful of the bruised knuckles and split skin that are taking their time to heal. 

Shaking her head, Quynh's voice is equally soft. "I do. But it wasn't the same. You were only slow to come back to us." 

He leans forward, casting deep into his blurry memories, and thinks, _wants to believe,_ that this is not the hand that fate had dealt them. "It's been a long road, Andromache. I had been tired once, as you have been these past years. It settled in my heart, and I thought it was my time." 

"It wasn't." She breathes out slowly, fingers twitching under his. 

"I hoped it wouldn't be." 

"You seemed at peace with it." 

"A little, or so I had thought." He lets his lips slide up into a small smile. "You were both so scared, so sad. I think that hurt more." 

Andromache's eyes water at the returned memory. "I didn't think we could die."

"It may be your time, or it may not." The tremor in Quynh's voice belies a glimmer of hope, and it ripples around the table. 

"What happens now? Is there something we can do?" Nicky asks, his hand reaches to cover theirs in the middle of the table. 

Joe's are next onto the pile, his little finger reaching into the tangle to prod at Andy's palm tucked inside. "Anything, Andy. Just say the word." 

Hesitating for only a moment, and clearly feeling more self-conscious. Nile adds her hand to the pile. Beside her, Booker only looks at Andromache with tired, sunken eyes and a watery smile. "I want to help." 

There's an indelicate snort from Joe, but no argument follows. 

"What changed, for you?" Andromache looks back at Lykon. 

It wasn't often that she didn't have the answers, either from experience or a gut feeling left behind from forgotten memories. It makes Lykon uneasy to think that this was new territory for her, that it could hinge upon whether he could help. 

But Nicky was also right, if it was her time, there was nothing they could do. So he gives her the truth he knows and hopes it's enough. 

"I felt it." Slowly, Lykon draws a hand out from the pile and raises it to rest it on his chest. "I felt it. In my heart, in my soul." 

She nods and a few tears fall across her cheeks which are joined by a few more from the rest of them before Booker slopes off to the counter for a refill and then excuses himself for fresh air, leaving them to decide on his punishment. 

* * *

As they begin to move on, Andromache resolutely ignores their fussing and occasionally snaps back, pushing at the boundaries they all agree on together. Preferring to spend her time training Nile, she decides their next task is to take their youngest immortal on a whistle stop tour across the world and so their small family of six pack up their bags and go. 

They camp under the stars deep in the middle of ancient forests and kilometres away from main trails through mountains. They lose themselves in the corners of the world, and they worry endlessly, as the dangers of a mortal existence suddenly return to the forefront of their thoughts. Even Booker in his exile calls, pretending to check in, but whenever Andromache passes the phone back over to Lykon, he can hear the relief down the line. 

It stretches into three long years, and a handful of missions that have them reworking their tactics to cover Andromache at all costs despite her insistence to breech first and lead them through firefights, and even clambering onto a rolling tank. A map of bruises covers her skin as they move from one place to another and she starts collecting scars, even with her staggering combat skill. 

She only laughs, prods at the changing colours blooming across her arms and legs, picks at the scabs on the side of her neck, and they make sure to stop by the nearest place to top up her small bag of medical supplies. 

One evening, two weeks into their downtime after a successful mission, Joe and Nicky turn in for the night and Quynh dozes on the sofa while Lykon and Andromache put away the last of the washed dishes from the sideboard. They whisper to each other, feeling sleep creep up on them both. 

"I was thinking of another job. I asked Copley to reach out to some of his contacts." 

"Another? So soon?"

"We've had a decent run lately. Nile's picking things up quickly and-" 

He quirks an eyebrow at her, "Maybe we are doing some good?" 

Andromache swipes at him with the dishcloth. "You sound like Nicky. Or worse, of those headlines on Copley's boards." 

" _Miracle woman survives thirty-storey fall. Saves child._ " Lykon laughs good-naturedly, leaning out of the way. 

"Paper is paper. It's different now...Last night-" She turns back to the sink and shakes her head slowly. "I dreamt about being on the steppe again. Before I was Andy, or Andrea, or even Andromache. I can barely remember now I'm awake, but it was just a feeling. I think it was the first time I felt glad I could do something to help."

Her smile turns softer, and then she laughs at herself. The sound is quiet and golden, fills up the narrow strip of kitchen, and Lykon tries to place the last time he had heard it. He comes up short, _too long_. 

"I keep thinking it was one of those memories I've imagined. Something invented to fill in the blanks."

He smiles back, "Perhaps." 

In her tiredness, her grip is a little too loose and the wet cutlery slips out of her hand and lands in a clatter on the floor. Lykon hears her wince, sees her dark blood drip onto the white tiles. 

"Are you alright?" He reaches for her, looking to replace the damp dishcloth with a clean one to stem the blood leaking out of the cut. 

But she shakes her head, peering into the bundle of cloth around her hand.

"Do you want to wake them up, or shall I?" Andromache asks, the shadow of her laughter still on her lips, and holds up her healed hand for him to see.

**Author's Note:**

> there's two other headcanons i did separate short fics for as well :)


End file.
